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Diatoms: unicellular surrogates for macroalgal community structure in streams?

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Abstract

As wholesale biodiversity assessment is often impractical, the use of surrogates that reflect the assemblage structure and diversity of other taxa has attracted increased attention. We sampled 47 boreal streams for diatoms and macroalgae and examined their assemblage patterns along major environmental gradients. Our main intention was to examine whether diatoms might be useful surrogates for macroalgae in boreal streams. We also assessed whether taxon richness and community composition provided similar insights into the patterns of cross-taxon concordance. According to canonical correspondence analysis, diatom distribution was most strongly related to water pH, conductivity, latitude and longitude, and macroalgal distribution to water pH and iron content, latitude and bed instability. In Mantel’s test, diatoms and macroalgae showed significant cross-taxon concordance. However, there was no significant correlation between taxon richness of the two algal groups, likely reflecting their differing responses to environmental variables. We found evidence that although diatoms and macroalgae are partly controlled by different environmental factors, they are segregated rather similarly along latitude and a few environmental gradients such as water pH and iron content. We conclude that, at least at broad geographical extents and in small streams, diatoms reflect the structure of the macroalgal community and are therefore useful surrogates for cost-effective biomonitoring of algal communities in streams.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by grants from the Academy of Finland (to JS and TM). We warmly acknowledge L. Aikola for stimulating discussions on algal ecology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 65, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Janne Soininen

  2. Department of Zoology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 3G5

    Riku Paavola

  3. Research Department, Finnish Environment Institute, P.O. Box 140, 00250, Helsinki, Finland

    Riku Paavola & Timo Muotka

  4. Institute of Nature Conservation, Polish Academy of Sciences, Mickiewizca 33, 31-120, Krakow, Poland

    Janina Kwandrans

  5. Department of Biology, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 3000, 90014, Oulu, Finland

    Timo Muotka

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  1. Janne Soininen
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  4. Timo Muotka
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Correspondence to Janne Soininen.

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Soininen, J., Paavola, R., Kwandrans, J. et al. Diatoms: unicellular surrogates for macroalgal community structure in streams?. Biodivers Conserv 18, 79–89 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-008-9447-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-008-9447-8

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